I'm surprised that no one's mentioned Rob as one of the good contestants. From what I saw in season 7, he took competitiveness up to another level, including quite a few questionable strategies, such as telling the station agent not to give any information to the Debbie/Bianca/Susan/Patrick alliance, bribing the driver to only open the front doors of the bus, stealing Debbie & Bianca's taxi, and convincing 2 other teams to take a 4 hour penalty so that he & Amber would be safe even by not finishing the task

I saw the Mendoza part of AR7 episode 3 with a different perspective. Rob did not cause Meredith or Ray to quit and take the 4 hour penalty. They did that for themselves, not because Rob suggested it (which he indeed did) when they realized independently that their chances of finishing 4 pounds of meat were low. Their strategy was validated when Patrick was not able to finish until after all 3 had finished the penalty but before Debbie and Bianca finally arrived.

Now that you mention it...I do remember reading a post race interview with Ray when he said that the decision to quit the roadblock wasn't made out to be like the editors portrayed it. What he said really happened was that shortly after arriving at the roadblock, he & Deana realized that it would take her longer than 4 hours to complete it. At that point, he & Rob did collaborate and decided together that taking the penalty was their best bet, so now Ray & Deana needed to make sure that a third team would take that penalty in order for the two of them to not be Philminated, which was why he told Meredith that it would be faster to take that penalty instead of try and eat the food

addie

I can't consider some one the best Amazing Race contestant ever if she cries every episode and I can name plenty of contestants who were stronger (mental and physical) than her. But I guess that's just my opinion cause she won Declive's the Best Racer game

I can't consider some one the best Amazing Race contestant ever if she cries every episode and I can name plenty of contestants who were stronger (mental and physical) than her. But I guess that's just my opinion cause she won Declive's the Best Racer game

Based on breakdown of all info we can compile (which is a lot more then who finished each tasks first), breakdown of time for navigation, time to complete tasks, how much teams lost waiting for tasks to start (typical of really good teams).

For example in modern TAR its normal to get several episodes a cycle that don't feature bunching, basically giving the first team, a great chance to remain first (yet actually race much worse then other teams), season 16 had a great example of this with The Cops starting first (no bunching) and they finished first. But the time to complete was actually tied with the slowest team. And it just one of many, many examples,where the results dont actually highlight how well a team actually did.

Based off of this I would say its between Eric or COlin.

Zac managed to really drag his partner through, and that took a lot, but they never managed a strong game, and at that time, task wise Zach could do all the tasks pretty much, unlike later seasons where their was a division of labor. Still a great guy though.

And a lot of modern teams have things like legs with no equalizers, multiple artificial facets of the race to change order, and are done over shorter periods of time so that they shouldn't be ever as tired as teams that raced 13 full legs. THough in fairness its a lot easier to compare racers over certain seasons.

Easier to compare seasons 1 - 5 (fast forward every leg), seasons 6-11 (full 13 leg seasons, and tasks that each person must accomplish), seasons 12- to current (U-Turns, and various other tasks to mix up the order, more episodes that have no equalizers, ect).

TAR5 is really an outlier season. They didn't yet have the RB restrictions of TAR6 to present. I think TAR5 actually caused the RB restrictions to be inacted. But TAR5 didn't have a FF every episode either and I think TAR5 is when the Yield was introduced. So in some respects it was like TAR1-4 and in other aspects it was like TAR6-11.

It is hard to reallly compare Zach, Colin and Eric. They all 3 had to drag non-performing/low performing female partners around the world. Zac and Colin had the ability to let the female not do any RBs. Eric at least had the RB restrictions to contend with too......yet still won.

I don't think it's really fair to compare contestants when they perform as teams. For instance, a lot of the airport stuff was done by Christie and not Colin. It's also worth noting that the teams in recent seasons are pretty much all forced onto the same flights. Would Eric & Danielle have performed as poorly if the flights were all arranged for them? Would Colin & Christie have won their 6 legs without their flight advantage? Would Rachel & Dave have won their 8 legs if they had to plan their own flights?